Cover image: Trude Schwab
The Green Parakeet extends the poetic sequence begun in Desmond Graham’s previous collection, Heart work, encapsulating a darker mood and engaging with daring contrasts of form.
The first half's elegiac sequence on an older brother finds vitality through loss, and love through difference.
The second section consists of 'Postcards from Germany'. Graham’s postcards range from dark and elusive to bright and teasing; they are of places we cannot know without imagination.
Throughout, Graham’s humour and invention make this an accessible collection that is a pleasure to read.
‘In the first half of his new book [...] there are affecting and amusing references, and the second half has imaginative glimpses of people he has seen and places he has been.’
Keith Richmond, Tribune, 18 September 2009
‘What unifies the whole collection is Graham’s concern to capture the quiddity of the loved thing, the essential genius of person and place.’
Andrew McCullough, TLS, April 2010
‘Graham has a way of finding fugitive rays of light.’
Poetry Wales
The Green Parakeet costs £7.50 and was published in July 2009.
ISBN: 978-1-906601-04-1
Until recently Desmond Graham was Professor of Poetry at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but is now a full-time writer with homes in Newcastle and Southern Germany. Flambard Press has published four themed collections by him, After Shakespeare (2001), Milena poems (2004), Heart work (2007) and The Green Parakeet (2009), as well as Two Darknesses (1994), a selection of poems by the major Polish poet Anna Kamienska that he co-translated. Graham’s poems have been widely translated into Polish and French. His is also well known as the biographer and editor of the poet Keith Douglas.
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